Board of Governors Member Says Fed Is Looking into Digital Dollar

• Lael Brainard has said the following in that the Fed is "conducting research and experimentation related to distributed ledger technologies and their potential use case for digital currencies…”
• Brainard said in the speech delivered at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California on the importance of the dollars worldwide dominance.

Speaking earlier this week, Lael Brainard - US central bank's board of governors - has said the following in that the Fed is "conducting research and experimentation related to distributed ledger technologies and their potential use case for digital currencies, including the potential for a CBDC [central bank digital currency]."

Brainard said in the speech, delivered at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California, on the importance of the dollars worldwide dominance:

“By transforming payments, digitalisation has the potential to deliver greater value and convenience at lower cost… [The fed needs to] remain on the frontier of both research and policy development.”

Despite this, the Fed is yet to evaluate the underlying technology and whether it would make payments safer as well as reducing operational costs.

Working in the private sector, the United States officials would have to determine "whether new guardrails need to be established, whether existing regulatory perimeters need to be redrawn, and whether a CBDC would deliver important benefits on net.”

Prior to this, Brainard brushed any suggestions that indicate that the Fed might launch its own cryptocurrency aside - much like many of the central banks across the globe. Back in May 2018, she spoke at a cryptocurrency conference in San Francisco where she said: "there is no compelling demonstrated need for a Fed-issued digital currency.”

However, despite this stance currently indicating that they are warming up to digital currency such as bitcoin, in her speech earlier this week, Brainard said that the unexpected release of Facebook’s upcoming stablecoin Libra "imparted urgency to the debate over what form money can take, who or what can issue it, and how payments can be recorded and settled.”

“Some of the new players are outside the financial system’s regulatory guardrails, and their new currencies could pose challenges in areas such as illicit finance, privacy, financial stability and monetary policy transmission,” she added.

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